"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Sunday, May 08, 2016

The "conservative" platform for cities: the recent London mayoral campaign

For years I've been meaning to write a piece about what a Republican agenda for cities would look like, and how much intersection there might be with a "progressive" agenda. After all, it was Fiorello LaGuardia who said that there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up trash...

One example would be New York City under Michael Bloomberg, who had a pro-city agenda especially on transportation, and favored the traditional "reform" effort in K-12 education and Mayoral control of schools, and pro-development.

Baker created a position for a deputy mayor in charge of Midtown, a low-income, African-American neighborhood, and filled it with Goliath Davis, the city's first black police chief. They brought a new library, theater, post office, health center and college campus to the area, spurring shopping centers and private retail chains to move in as well. While poverty and drug abuse remain high there, violent crime has dropped and dozens of businesses have opened up.

Baker has paid close attention to other, better-off neighborhoods as well. But his most widely noticed achievement may lie in expanding the city's overall infrastructure of parks, bike trails, public swimming pools and playgrounds — St. Petersburg is on course to have a playground within a half-mile walk of every home in the city. "The reason people are here is because of the quality of life of the city," Baker says. "Everything we do, we should be advancing that quality of life to make people like it even more."

One part of the civic infrastructure on which Baker has lavished special attention isn't even the city's: The public schools are run by the Pinellas County School Board. Unwilling to spend scarce time and political capital on trying to gain control of the city's schools, Baker instead has used the mayoralty to muster civic attention to improving them. He has raised more than $11 million in donations; overseen the awarding of more than 750 college scholarships to low-income students; recruited corporate partners for every public school in the city; created a fund to reward principals whose schools perform well on the state's grading system for schools; created a loan program for teachers who want to buy homes in St. Petersburg; and recruited 1,000 mentors for students — including himself. "We've gotten spoiled with what he's been able to do," says Terry Boehm, president of the Pinellas Education Foundation. "He's going to be a tough act to follow."

While the Conservative candidate for mayor, Zac Goldsmith, was rightly excoriated for impugning his Labour opponent's Muslim heritage as the primary reason to vote Conservative, his "Action Plan for London" appears to have been a lot more detailed and pro-urban than the average platform of candidates running as Democrats for political office in major US cities, with obvious exceptions, such as policies toward labor unions.

As an example, the Transportation element is far more direct and specific and focused on expanding transit service than any comparable elected official's candidacy platform, not just in DC, but in the metropolitan area.

(Remember how Mayor DeBlasio suggested eliminating the public spaces on Broadway?--a signature accomplishment of Janette Sadik-Khan and the Bloomberg Administration--as a way to crack down on crime issues associated with people dressed up as cartoon characters and aggressively seeking donations.)

Although maybe it's necessary for these platforms to be more detailed from the outset because unlike in the US system, where there is a multi-month lag between the general election and the assumption of office, in the UK, it's virtually immediate.

In any case, to move cities forward in the context of state and national politics, much more detailed agendas are required, as well as a key focus on the agenda, rather than personalities, religious affiliations, etc.

There needs to be a rigorous debate on what that agenda should be. Both Mayor Baker and Mayor Bloomberg invested in civic infrastructure, more than the typical Democratic mayor, although it can be argued, as Brash does in his book, that the benefits of that agenda in New York City disproportionately benefited the well off. The challenge is to equalize the benefits and to focus more efforts on the successful alleviation of poverty so that less of a city's budget is spent on keeping the impoverished poor rather than improving their circumstances.

About Me

I am an urban/commercial district revitalization and transportation/mobility advocate and consultant and a principal in BicyclePASS, a bicycle facilities systems integration firm, based in Washington, DC. Urban economic competitiveness is dependent on efficient transit and mixed use, compact places. Therefore, I end up writing mostly about mobility and urban design. While I am based in and write about Washington, DC issues, I try to write so that "universal lessons" are evident in the entries.